It's a Mystery to Me: The Craft of the Mystery Story Revealed (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781479277537)

Michael Kurland has spent all of his adult life as a full-time professional writer, except for a few brief interludes when he took jobs that would look good on the back of a book jacket. He taught high school English, was road manager of an unsuccessful rock and roll band, worked for a private detective agency, was managing editor of Crawdaddy, a short-lived national music magazine, and was even, briefly, a book publisher. After a few years writing mainly science fantasy, which he refers to as his Blue Period, Kurland concentrated on mysteries. He was nominated for an Edgar award for A Plague of Spies, the third in the War, Inc. trilogy and then again for The Infernal Device, the first Moriarty novel, which was also a finalist for the American Book Award. He has published over 30 novels and a couple of dozen short stories as of last Tuesday. His most recent novel is The Empress of India, the fourth in the Moriarty series. The fifth, Who Thinks Evil, is due out soon. Kurland has also done a bunch of non-fiction, notably How to Solve a Murder, a book on forensics, How to Try a Murder, a book on how murder trials work and Irrefutable Evidence, on the history of scientific crime-solving. His works have been translated into Chinese, Czech, Danish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and some alphabet full of little pothooks and curlicues. Mr. Kurland presently lives in a Secular Humanist Hermitage in a secluded bay north of San Francisco, California, where he kills and skins his own vegetables. He may be communicated with through his website, michaelkurland.com.